Furthermore, neither in Antioch nor in Ḥarrān nor in Jundīshāpūr could one find a single scientist or philosopher of any importance who could have produced any work that could demonstrate his or her sophisticated understanding of the classical Greek scientific and philosophical texts, let alone match them in brilliance. Sure, one may find some references to such folk scientific ideas as names of stars, calendar approximations, or some astrological prognostications, of the type we see in the works of the Syriac scientists mentioned below, or even the works of Paulus Alexandrinus.[10] One may even find some elementary medical texts, or texts dealing with weather prognostication and star configurations, or even texts containing pharmacological material (mostly in the form of home remedies). But nothing of the caliber of the classical Greek scientific texts could be found.
Besides, how could it be possible for one or two cities in any empire to acquire and maintain a viable scientific tradition when there was no concrete evidence of such a flourishing tradition in any of those cities, nor was there any evidence that the rest of the cities of the empire could have produced anything of the sort? If the capital city could not have those sciences available, and if those who went through great hardships to study them (as had happened with Leon the Mathematician) were so poorly viewed by their own students, then how could those sciences be available at less important centers, so that they would exert any perceivable influence on a foreign culture that came in contact with them? If those pockets could exist for hundreds of years in such isolation, and still maintain a sophisticated degree of philosophical and scientific production similar to what was reached in the classical times before the third century A.D., that would be an unparalleled phenomenon that would require much documentation by the proponents of such a theory before it could be really accepted.
And yet there is some debatable evidence of sorts. In his account of the transmission of philosophy to the lands of Islam,[11] the philosopher al-Fārābī (d. 950) recounts the story of how philosophy was transmitted from Greece to Alexandria, and from there to Antioch, Ḥarrān, and Marw, and finally to Baghdad. But a close examination of that story (which became the basis of a famous article by Max Meyerhof, "Von Alexandrien nach Baghdad"[12]) makes one appreciate Paul Lemerle's remark about it: "Je ne suis pourtant pas certain qu'on puisse accepter sans retouche la séduisante construction de M. Meyerhof."[13] The story certainly seems to reveal more about Fārābī's desire to connect himself to the long philosophical line stretching back to Aristotle than about his desire to produce an accurate historical account of the actual transmission of philosophy from Greece to the Islamic civilization. This is corroborated by the fact that it is the same Fārābī, and in the same story, who recounts the persecution of the philosophers (and we should understand that as including scientists, since science, at the time, was really natural philosophy) at the hands of the Byzantine emperors as well as the Christian church. In it he only mentions the very brief respite from persecution that occurred during the very short rule of Flavius Claudius Julius (361-363). More pointedly, it was Fārābī too, who recounts, in the same story, the persecution of philosophy at the hands of Christianity (consistent with what we just mentioned of the fate of Hypatia and others). And in that regard, Fārābī asserts, in no ambiguous terms, that philosophy was finally freed only when it reached the lands of Islam.
If this were the case, and there is much evidence to corroborate the account of persecution as we have already seen, then how could classical Greek philosophy maintain a rigorous tradition, in cities far apart, and at such times when the official policy of the state was to suppress that very same tradition, and when the only support that was ever given to philosophy was during a three-year reign of an emperor who was fought on every ground and was indeed called "the apostate"? With all those questions, and with this kind of evidence that is used for its support, one need not say anything more about the inability of this theory to explain the transmission of Greek science into Arabic.
(3) Then there are those who propose a more nuanced theory of transmission of the Greek philosophical sciences to Islamic civilization by postulating a transmission that went through the Syriac medium first. And this theory too has some evidence to support it. In this context people cite the works of the Syriac writers Paul the Persian (c. 550) and Sergius of Ras'aina (d. 536), and the slightly later writers Severus Sebokht (c. 660) and George, Bishop of the Arabs (c. 724). The theory asserts that those people brought the Greek tradition into Syriac first, only to make it available for Arabic translations later on.
And all those Syriac authors produced works that could be described as scientific, with some degree of seriousness. But when those works are examined carefully, they turn out to be of the same quality as the ones that were produced in the larger Byzantine Empire; that is, they were elementary relative to the classical Greek texts. Paul's work did not seem to extend beyond the elementary treatises on logic,[14] and Sergius did not apparently venture with his astronomical explorations much beyond the Apotelesmatica of Paulus Alexandrinus (c. 378), from which he adopted a very elementary approximative method for calculating the positions of the sun and the planets.[15] The method was so crude that it could nowhere be compared with the more exacting methods of Ptolemy's Almagest and Handy Tables. The fact that Sergius knew of such august works of the classical Greek tradition is duly attested by his references to them, but only to say that they were to be sought only by those who needed higher precision. He seemed to have satisfied himself with the work of Paulus Alexandrinus.
The slightly more sophisticated works of Severus Sebokht (for example, his treatise on the use of the astrolabe[16]), and those of George, Bishop of the Arabs,[17] are not much closer to the classical Greek scientific texts, and in general they exhibit the more historically understandable standard of being of about the same quality as the contemporary Byzantine sources from which they seem to have derived their inspiration. And why should it be otherwise? Why should the poorer Byzantine subjects, as the Syriac-speaking subjects were, know more than the more sophisticated and much richer Byzantine overlords?
In fact we get echoes of this social class distinction, and the enmities that went with it, from the works of Severus Sebokht himself, who does not shy away from bragging against the Byzantine Greeks by asserting that his own ancestry extended all the way back to Babylonia, and that there were other nations, like the Indians, who could outsmart the Greeks in science.[18] He cites as evidence of the Indians' superiority their knowledge of the decimal system, with which, he says, "they calculate with nine figures only."[19]
10
See G. Saliba, "Paulus Alexandrinus in Syriac and Arabic",
11
Still preserved in the work of the thirteenth-century bio-bibliographer Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a,
12
Max Meyerhof, "Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts den Araben",
13
Paul Lemerle,
14
See the detailed entry in the supplement of the
16
F. Nau, "Le traité de l'astrolabe plan de Sévère Sébokt, publié pour la première fois d'aprés un Ms. de Berlin",
17
For his astronomical works that relate more to ancient folk Babylonian science rather than to sophisticated Greek science, see V. Ryssel, "Die Astronomischen Briefe Georgs des Araberbischofs",
18
See F. Nau, "La plus ancienne mention orientale des chiffres indiens",